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Comedian Kathy Griffin to perform in Red Bank, Morristown

Bill Nutt, Correspondent;
12:06 a.m. EDT April 18, 2014

“I am an EG,” Griffin says proudly, referring to her Emmy win. “Now I’m looking for the O and the T,” a reference to the Oscar and Tony that make up the grand slam of show-business awards.
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Kathy Griffin jokes about a lot of things. But she’s semi-serious when she says that awards really do matter to her.

Earlier this year, Griffin won a Grammy for her comedy album “Calm Down Gurrl.” That award accompanies the two Emmys she received in 2007 and 2008 for her reality TV show, “My Life on the D-List.”

“I am an EG,” Griffin says proudly. “Now I’m looking for the O and the T,” a reference to the Oscar and Tony that make up the grand slam of show-business awards.

She points out that she did have a limited-run Broadway show called “Kathy Griffin Wants a Tony.” Ironically — or was it deliberate — the American Theater Wing, which awards the Tonys, eliminated the honor for limited-run productions that year.

“Coincidence? I don’t think so,” says Griffin.

“I’m a pale freckled girl from Illinois who never thought she’d go to an awards show, let alone win one,” Griffin says. “My awards are just a little bit of a middle finger to Hollywood and the nuns who said I’d never amount to anything.”

Griffin will bring her unapologetically blunt style of humor to the Count Basie Theatre tonight, April 18, and the Mayo Performing Arts Center for two shows on Saturday, April 19.

“It will be an evening of negativity,” she says cheerfully. “I’m like a natural disaster, or like Gov. Christie.”

But Griffin adds that she has no idea what she’ll be saying until she says it.

“It’s all improv,” she says. “The only thing I know I’ll do is that I’ll offend someone. I love a good walk-out. It’s for the grown-ups. Leave the kids at home.”

Griffin says that she turned to comedy partly as a defense mechanism. A native of Oak Park, Ill., she has spoken candidly about eating disorders when she was young, as well as issues within her family.

“My parents take the fall,” she says. “When you grow up in an environment that is gleefully dysfunction, you have to have something.”

From the start, Griffin’s sense of humor gravitated to quirkiness.

“I loved the sidekicks on TV,” she says. “Rhoda and Phyllis on ‘The Mary Tyler Moore Show.’ Ethel on ‘I Love Lucy.’ The pretty girl got the guy, but the sidekick got the laughs.”

She remembers “worshipping” Second City, the legendary Chicago comedy troupe. When Griffin moved to Los Angeles as a teenager, she almost immediately joined the Groundlings, that city’s improv company.

“I saw a Groundlings show. Afterward, I walked up to the great Phil Hartman,” she says. “That’s how I got started.”

When she wasn’t performing or working temp jobs, Griffin was also teaching at the Groundlings school. “I had people like Will Ferrell, Cheri Oteri and J.J. Abrams in my class,” she says. “It was the most fun I had.”

Gradually, Griffin landed acting jobs, including a stint as the sidekick to Brooke Shields on the TV show “Suddenly Susan.” Her stand-up routines gained her even more attention, leading to cable specials and programs such as “My Life on the D-List.”

Though by most measures Griffin’s career is successful, she still feels that there are plenty of worlds to conquer.

“It’s a very sexist landscape,” she says. “The idea that ‘chicks aren’t funny’ is still out there, even after all this time.”

“When Joan Rivers (one of her idols) got a late-night talk show in the 1980s, I thought that was it,” she says. “I thought from now on, everything will be 50/50, men and women. It didn’t happen.”

Though she says she loves stand-up, she also still loves to act.

“I like to be live and ‘in the moment,’ ” Griffin says. “But anyplace I can be funny and do my thing, I would love to do it. If I could be funny in a 30-second commercial, I’ll do that.”

“There’s always another job to do,” she says. “There’s always another glass ceiling to break.”